October 13, 2005

College Basketball Looms Just Around the Corner

By | October 13, 2005

I feel like Cinderella, and the NCAA is my fairy godmother. Tomorrow night, when the clock strikes 12, Midnight Madness will sweep across the country. The Madness falls somewhere between fall equinox and the winter solstice, and it marks the beginning of the most magical season of all – college basketball.

Picture pacing the Schoellkopf turf with football coach Jim Knowles ’87, or waiting for a line change next to men’s hockey coach Mike Schafer ’86. That’s how close the fans get in a basketball game – you can see the sweat and the struggle, feel the backboard shudder under a dunk, and hear the squeal of skin on hardwood when someone dives for a loose ball. It’s five people moving in concert, the simplest and most exciting game there is. And in college, it’s played for the purest ambition – to be the best, to be the last one standing when the Madness ends with “One Shining Moment” in March.

It all started for me with an annual pilgrimage to Madison Square Garden. We would drive to Albany, take the train to Penn Station, and cross the street into the promised land. On my first visit, the Blue Devils demolished St. John’s, and Shane Battier and Mike Dunleavy waved to me from the team bus. I floated the 280 miles home. The sequel was even better: second-row seats, courtside. For the first time, I realized how tall 6-9 really was. Everything was larger than life – including Marcus Camby’s size 22s, which I got to see up close and personal in a locker room tour after the game. The last trip was a heartbreaker – because Marcus Hatten made two free throws after the clock ran out to beat Duke, and because Coach K and Chris Duhon were too crushed to stop and talk to a fan – me – on the sidewalk outside afterwards.

Before I bled carnelian and white and Cornell was my No. 1 team, I was Orange inside and out. My dad is from Syracuse, my grandfather played lacrosse for the Orangemen, and my sister lived in a dorm next to the Dome for three years. The one year she lived across campus, I would call from in front of the T.V. at home to rave about a play by ‘Melo or a three from McNamara – and she would be in bed with a hangover. But she made it to the Dome to watch the championship game with thousands of other students on a big screen T.V., and was part of the riot on Marshall Street afterwards. I was on the couch at home, dreaming of the day I would get to celebrate with my team after they won it all.

I was still waiting last spring, when my friend from UNC called me to relive his Final Four weekend in St. Louis. Talk about a fairy tale – he scalped his ticket to the semifinal game for $1,250, had a seat 13 rows behind the basket for the championship game, shook hands with Roy Williams and Rashad McCants after the final buzzer, and then drove back to the team hotel, where he and his friends shared a celebratory smoke with Julius Peppers. On the way back to the hotel, one of the guys in the car – the one wearing Michael Jordan’s jersey from the Tar Heel years – looked over to the next car at a stoplight, where the Greatest of All Time himself sat waving back. It reads like the screenplay of my own personal Disney movie.

So here I am at Cornell, a school whose name has only once been one of the 64 selected to grace the bracket, the greatest dance card of all time. We’ve never even been asked to be No. 65 – the sacrificial lamb in a play-in game. But I’ve been a victim of the Madness for too long to give up hope. I felt it when my worlds collided on Dec. 19, 2004, when the Red took on then-No. 8 Syracuse. We trailed by one point at halftime, and put up a school-record and Dome-record 15 three-pointers before falling, 82-69. And even in defeat, there’s the pride that your team stuck with the big dogs, and the awe in seeing people you take classes with compete on a stage that grand. As if that wasn’t enough to make me wish for more, Coach Donahue led the men’s team to a second-place finish last year – the best we’ve done in 17 years – and just one spot on the podium short of a tournament bid. Just a few league games short of being the Ancient Eight’s Cinderella.

Tomorrow night, Midnight Madness will sweep the nation. The Tar Heels will have Late Night with Roy Williams, 23,000 fans will pack Rupp Arena to watch Kentucky’s first official practice of the season, and I will be at Cornell’s version of the Madness: CTP after the bars close. But we will all have the same dream – a chance to follow our team to the Big Dance.

Olivia Dwyer is a Sun Assistant Sports Editor. Forever Wild will appear every other Thursday this semester.

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ByOctober 14, 2005

Cornell volleyball (10-3, 3-0 Ivy) looks to take sole possession of first place in the Ancient Eight as Princeton (10-3, 2-1 Ivy) and Penn (6-7, 3-0 Ivy) make their annual visits to Newman Arena tonight and tomorrow afternoon, respectively. The Red is set to take the floor tonight against the Tigers after a close, five-game loss against Syracuse (15-7, 4-2 Big East) last Tuesday at the Orange’s Manley Field House. The loss snapped the Red’s nine-game winning streak. The defeat was Cornell’s first since the opening weekend of the regular season, in which it lost to a solid Duke (10-5, 4-3 ACC) team at the Duke Invitational Tournament. Despite the loss, the Red has been dominating opponents midway through the regular season. “We’re at a good point, having set our foundation at a high level,” said senior co-captain Kelly Kramer. “Everyone knows that we can even be better and we want to keep building on that this weekend.” Kramer posted a season-high 30 digs against the Orange, moving her into second place on the Red’s all-time career digs list. After recording 14 kills with only two errors against Yale on Saturday and then hitting a career-high 19 kills against Syracuse, junior middle blocker Joanna Weiss has become a force for the Red, offering the team a strong second option on the attack. Weiss currently ranks second in the Ivy League with a .375 hitting percentage. Junior Thais Mirela also made a splash for the Red this past weekend. She recorded the first double-double of her Cornell career against the Orange after she notched 17 kills and 15 digs. Princeton arrives on the East Hill seeking revenge after last year’s 3-0 defeat at the hands of the Red in the semifinal match of the Ivy League playoff for the NCAA tournament bid. Cornell has won the last three matches against Princeton but the Tigers enter tonight’s match-up having won two in a row and nine of their last 11. Princeton leads the Ancient Eight in service aces with 104 for the season, good enough for 12th in the nation. “Every year Princeton has a good volleyball team,” said Cornell head coach Deitre Collins. “They’re a little bit bigger this year with the freshmen that they’ve added and they are a team that you have to beat, because you know that they aren’t going to make a lot of mistakes.” The Tigers feature a young yet efficient attack led by junior Lauren Grumet, freshman Lindsey Ensign, and fellow rookie Parker Henritze. Henritze will look to make her case for Ivy League Rookie of the Year as she will likely line up against Elizabeth Bishop. The two players rank one and two in kills per game in the Ivy League with 5.17 and 4.62 respectively. Princeton will rely heavily on Jenny McReynolds – the Ivy League leader in digs – in the defensive backcourt. The Quakers enter tomorrow’s contest in the midst of a three-match winning streak, and currently are tied with the Red for first place in the Ivy League. Despite its undefeated record in Ivy play, Penn still remains winless on the road. Cornell will face the Quakers for the first time since the Red was swept 3-0 last November in Philadelphia. “We can’t overlook Penn’s record because they’ve played one of the hardest non-conference schedules in the Ivy League,” Collins said. “We know that this is a team that we have to beat.” Penn is led by sophomore setter Linda Zhang and senior outside hitter Cara Thomason who leads the team with 110 kills on the season. Penn ranks fourth in the league in opponent hitting percentage and blocks per game. “We’re excited to be playing this weekend and we just want to continue to do what we’ve been doing,” Collins said. “This is what we’re focused on and we’ll be ready to show up for sure.” Archived article by Tim Kuhls Sun Staff Writer

ByOctober 14, 2005

Backspace appears biweekly in commemoration of The Sun’s 125th Anniversary. Honoring not only the history of The Cornell Daily Sun but also the role it played in major campus events throughout the years, each column features different writers chronicling a different era of Cornell’s lively past. Preston Mendenhall ’93 and Saman Zia-Zarifi law ’93 are both former Sun columnists. Mendenhall is an NBC News correspondent based in Moscow and Zia-Zarifi is research director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. – MK The announcement, in the fall of 1990, grabbed national headlines. And the number – $1.25 billion – was astounding. Cornell was the first American university to try to cross the billion-dollar mark. As students and Sun writers, we were impressed. But what, we wondered, would the big donors get for their money, and what would Day Hall do to get its hands on it? Almost anything, Fawn Fulbright-Rosenberg found out. “Dear President Rhodes,” Fawn’s first letter to then President Frank H.T. Rhodes began, “My lawyer and close personal friend, Felix Obermeyer, has informed me that I am able to give the sum of $3.6 million to Cornell in the name of my beloved husband David.” Fawn went on to describe David’s deep connection to his Alma Mater and his dying wish that important things be done with his fortune. Within days, she received a lovely personal response, offering “deepest condolences” for Fawn’s loss and suggesting that parting with some of David’s cash would ease her grief and honor David’s memory. Fawn had made it clear that David had enjoyed Cornell. But David had also seemingly enjoyed halcyon student days at Penn. And Princeton. And Harvard. And Yale. And – (you get the picture). Similar letters on similar light blue stationary carried David’s post-mortem offer of support to all the Ivy League universities – somehow never clarifying whether the generous alum was David Fulbright or David Rosenberg. The folks at Mail Boxes, Etc. who administered to Fawn’s overflowing letterbox in Aspen collected condolences from all the Ivies, extending their hands to Fawn in her (and their) hour of need. Then, like laser guided green-seeking missiles, they quickly focused on the business at hand. Vartan Gregorian, the president of Yale, proposed flying to Aspen for a personal meeting to talk about Fawn’s donation. Yale also sent a shopping list of what $3.6 million would buy in New Haven (from endowed professorships to cornerstones on new buildings). Harvard President Derek Bok thought Fawn might like to visit Cambridge to walk in David’s footsteps. Two schools admitted they had trouble locating David’s records, but still treated him as their own. So far, so good. This was the kind of cynical, insincere fundraising we were hoping to uncover. We calculated that most Ivies could find a David Fulbright and a David Rosenberg in class records. We had a plan. Fawn would extend invitations to all the Ivy League presidents to visit her in Aspen. When Rhodes, Gregorian, Bok and the rest of the gang bumped into each other in the airport, we would catch it all on film. So Fawn penned a second letter to help all the schools in their search for her dear David. She apologized for her failing memory and forgetting David’s graduation year. Alas, all she remembered was that he liked hockey and that his studies were interrupted “during the war.” We could almost hear archivists groaning. Which war? Did David ever return to graduate? Oh, the pressure to match matriculation records with the fading memory of an imaginary doddering millionairesse! We went to increasingly desperate lengths to hold off Fawn’s ardent suitors. We even recruited family members to empty her mailbox, drive to California and post Fawn’s letter declining a meeting because she was attending her “darling granddaughter’s graduation” in Bel Aire. But the requests for meetings kept coming, now accompanied by more intrusive questions from increasingly skeptical fundraisers – which dorm did he live in? And did you say it was Rosenberg or Fulbright? We had created a monster. With our own graduations approaching, and after some research on penalties for interstate mail fraud, Fawn put down her pen. In June, Princeton wrote that, after consultations with Penn, both schools were impressed by the “breadth of David’s educational experience.” The gig was up. Then the last package arrived, hand delivered by a visiting Penn fundraising official, unaware we had been found out by his superiors. Noticing that Fawn’s address was just a mail drop, he nevertheless happily reported that Penn had found David Rosenberg. A 1938 yearbook was enclosed, with a Post-it on David’s page. And yes, Cornell raised the $1.25 billion, even without the Fulbright-Rosenberg fortune.Archived article by